yantantether

Went to see the American Ballet Theatre do Onegin. I just barely missed seeing Takumi Miyake as Lensky, which I really regret, but on the other hand I got to see Calvin Royal* in the role, a floating, gorgeous dancer I’ve seen before who has a consistently adorable stage presence (making Lensky’s fate that much sadder; Onegin, how can you do that to such a sweetheart. During the intermission, I heard a group of college kids or similar in the row ahead of me energetically debating what makes Onegin the biggest asshole, quote unquote.) I’ve never heard of the choreographer, John Cranko—the production was made in 1965—and I don’t know how it stacks up against Balanchine, Ashton, etc. for people in the know, but I thought it was very good theater, and the dancers did the acting well. My favorite part of the actual dancing was the Act I dream pas-de-deux, because of all the astonishing lifts, in which the Onegin (Aran Bell) did a good job of making the Tatiana (Devon Teuscher) into the star of the show, letting her fly. Slow lifts (and whatever it’s called when the man sets the woman down again) can be even more exciting than fast ones.
(Dance performances always make me remember Toni Bentley’s rendition of what the corps dancers say to each other when they come off stage—“Shit, I made so many mistakes. Was [the ballet mistress] watching?” “I’ve never never danced so badly, I’m in shock!” but also, occasionally, “Wow, that was fun!”)
My own fault for not doing my homework, but I’d been super looking forward to hearing the Onegin opera music with the ballet—the real draw, if anything—and was much disappointed to find that the music is a string of kleinmeister-level Tchaikovsky pastiche (I mean, real Tchaikovsky, but not his best work; the only one I actually recognized was what I always think of as the theme from The Rebel lol). Why would you DO that when you could have such a good thing going, I don’t understand the way ballet people think about music. That said, the orchestra was good.
I didn’t like the costumes for the last scene, Tatiana and Onegin; he’s still in black and she’s wearing a kind of charcoal-gray dress, meaning that without opera glasses it was hard to distinguish their two separate bodies from high up during their pas de deux. I can see dramatically where the costume comes from, but at least they could have put her in dark green or something? Still, it’s an amazing scene, up there with the ending of Jenufa in terms of the moral victory over a weak man of a woman who stays true to herself. (With apologies to the Russian speakers, I kept wanting to call Tatiana’s rather sweet husband Prince Gremlin, which of course is not his name.)
*Some article about Calvin Royal also quotes him saying very sweetly of his partner, the pianist Jacek Mysinski, that he can feel his presence when Mysinski is playing for a ballet performance: “It’s almost like having him at my side, almost like a partner” aw.

Thinking about what makes the difference between characters who feel real and those who don’t (flat/one-dimensional/etc.). I’m sure that whole books have been written about this, I have nothing new and original to say here, but it’s on my mind, due to both reading and writing lately. To me the characters I write feel real, but I expect most writers feel that way, and God knows it doesn’t necessarily mean they come off that way to others. Is there an objective distinction to be made, and if so what is it? (other than the classic definition of pornography, “I know it when I see it…”).
Maybe if: the writer believes in the characters as people who are living, changing, developing, interacting, experiencing throughout the book/story, and whose behavior is in keeping therewith, rather than static archetypes or plot devices? Characters who are more than just their utility to the book, and are designed to be people who live in that world rather than to match given types or to provoke specific feelings in the reader (that sense of YOU SHOULD LIKE/DISLIKE THIS PERSON that sometimes arises, the writer’s hand visible in the background).
Examples, on either side? (The obvious dichotomy that came to mind for me was that Antonia Forest never wrote a flat character in her life: even apart from her main and major side characters, we get people like Elaine Rees, the rather vapid classmate who gets her own moment of inspiration onstage, or Val Longstreet, the tiresome prefect who flinches in spite of herself when facing a fast bowler. Meanwhile, genuinely real-feeling characters are far to seek in most of Elinor Brent-Dyer, but now and then they momentarily emerge, in spite of their author’s best efforts: cf Grizel, Miss Slater, Tom.)

Jiang Dunhao song of the post: 我爱你推广大使, which is about as much joy as anyone can fit into three minutes and forty-one seconds.

A translator’s joke passed on to me from A-Pei, who was checking a JA-ZHTW text. Japanese transliterates rather than translating the English technical terms “sink” and “source”; either a person or a machine, it could be either one, had looked at ソース and produced 酱汁 as the Taiwanese version. Please do not apply sauce to your electronic equipment!

Reading “The Rape of Lucrece” with yaaurens and company, finding a handful of phrases I want to hang on to for later: “Nor read the subtle-shining secrecies/Writ in the glassy margents of such books” / “For one sweet grape who will the vine destroy?” / “Mar not the thing that cannot be amended” / “This helpless smoke of words.”

You know what, I realized I never posted about finishing the second season of Under the Skin.

spoilers within

On the whole I was pleased with it; it was a much happier ending than I’d actually expected (the little teaser at the end I don’t take too seriously). It almost felt unearned to me—Shen Yi’s increasing fall into, I don’t know what to call it, traumatic stress disorder of some kind along with whatever it’s called when you feel like you’re the only one who can save the world? seemed more believable than the rooftop conversation where we learn that he’s effectively undercover and it’s (mostly) a front, and I wouldn’t have found it odd if we ended the season with Shen Yi genuinely deeply troubled and more on Fang Kaiyi’s side than Du Cheng’s; in a way it would have been more interesting to see how he might then climb out of there in a prospective third season. Oh well, that’s what fic is for, I guess. While I thought Fang Kaiyi’s actor did a good job of making him compelling, I (shallowly) didn’t find him especially attractive (another role that Liu Chang would have done good work in…). (On the other hand, the actress playing Tang Keying was gorgeous, not least because they let her be on the curvy side.

Photos: Just a couple. Cherries, ajisai, a very large-scale prayer.

Be safe and well.